"Symantec has been lying to its customers. We exposed this point thus
spreading the world that ppl need" - #AntiSec #Anonymous Spread and
share!" said a statement accompanying the download link on Pirate Bay.

The security company told ZDNet UK the source code was bona fide on Tuesday.

"Symantec can confirm that the source code is legitimate," the company said. "It is part of the original cache of code for 2006 versions of the products that Anonymous has claimed to have been in possession during the last few weeks."

"Be advised, we also anticipate Anonymous to post the rest of the code they have claimed have in their possession. So far, they have posted code for the 2006 version of Norton Internet Security and PCAnywhere. We also anticipate that at some point, they will post the code for Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition and Norton Systemworks."

The appearance of the PCAnywhere code follows the failure of negotiations between a purported Symantec employee called 'Sam Thomas' and a hacker called 'YamaTough', who claimed to be a member of the Lords of Dhamaraja activist group, which is associated with Anonymous. In an email exchange posted on Pastebin, YamaTough appeared to be blackmailing Symantec for cash to destroy
stolen source code, and the Symantec appeared to offer Yamatough $50,000 to do it.

However, the hacker claimed in a Tweet that he merely tricked
Symantec into "offering a bribe", while the security company said the 'Sam Thomas' emails came from a fake account to investigate the "extortion" attempt.

"The communications with the person(s) attempting to extort the payment
from Symantec were part of [a] law enforcement investigation," Symantec said in a statement on Monday. "Given that
the investigation is still ongoing, we are not going to disclose the
law enforcement agencies involved and have no additional information to
provide."

The email discussions between the two broke down on Monday at 10:46pm, and YamaTough said in a Tweet at around 11:45am on Tuesday that source code for Symantec's flagship
Norton Antivirus would be released "in 7 hours".

YamaTough claims to have access
to source code for PCAnywhere, Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security, Norton
GoBack, Norton Utilities and Norton SystemWorks code, and has said that code is now up for sale.